So what is the deal with the small number of people whom transportation researchers have found to be perfectly fine with their commutes, even—shockingly—enjoying them? This is a real thing: When researchers studied the preferences of 1,300 Bay Area commuters in 2004, they found that “about half of the sample were relatively satisfied with the amount they commute, with a small segment actually wanting to increase that amount.” And when the Canadian government administered a survey about 10 years ago, they found that the proportion of respondents who liked commuting (38 percent) was larger than that of those who didn’t like it (30 percent). Sixteen percent, strangely, said they really enjoyed the experience.

How Canadians Felt in 2005 About Daily Activities

Statistics Canada, General Social Survey

Commuting is, at the very least then, a polarizing activity. But what accounts for the broad spectrum of attitudes toward it? What makes it more or less likely that someone will enjoy trudging—or skipping—to work each morning?

One major factor is how people feel about what they’re trudging toward. When the Canadian government studied its citizens’ commuting habits and preferences closely in the mid-aughts, it found that people’s attitudes toward their jobs mattered a lot: The probability that people who liked their work “a great deal” also liked commuting was 64 percent; for those who strongly disliked their work, it was 10 percent. Getting paid well doesn’t hurt either: A Swiss researcher found that people who commute an hour would have to be paid 40 percent more in order to be as happy in life as someone who lives and works in a single neighborhood.

At first glance, it would seem like mode of transport matters a lot too. The Canadians found that only 23 percent of workers who took public transit enjoyed their commute, while that was true of 39 percent of drivers.

But for most people something else trumps mode of transport (and nearly everything else) as a predictor of whether someone would enjoy her commute: how long it takes. It turns out that public-transit commutes tend to be longer than commutes in cars, and when duration was held constant, commuters seemed just as (dis)pleased with subways and buses as with cars. In a 2006 study, researchers who surveyed 208 suburban New Yorkers who took the train to Manhattan arrived at a pretty clear-cut relationship: The longer the commute, the more stressed-out someone will be.

But there was one tiny, peculiar group whom the Canadian government found in its data—3 percent of respondents—who claimed that commuting was the best part of their day—and who didn’t seem as fazed by lengthy commutes. Who on Earth were these people?

They were bikers, mostly. Nineteen percent of people who rode their bikes to work said commuting was their most delightful daily activity, compared to only 2 percent of drivers who felt the same way. (People who walked to work were also significantly more likely to enjoy commuting than people who drove, but biking was yet a stronger predictor.)

Unfortunately for many workers, a short commute or biking may not be options. Whether a worker decides to take a train, drive a car, or bike, and how long the trip lasts, are more determined by what’s available (or cost-effective or safe) given the location of their office vis-a-vis their home than it is about what they’d prefer to do under perfect circumstances of their own creation.

But external factors aren’t everything: Recently, a team of researchers led by Jon Jachimowicz, a doctoral student studying management at Columbia Business School, and Julia Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, identified a personality trait that seems to dictate how much of a toll a commute takes on any given person: self-control. In the study, they found that people with lower levels of self-control were more emotionally exhausted by long commutes. “We find … that that then also predicts whether or not they leave the organization six months later,” Jachimowicz told me.

The reason why, he theorizes, is that people who have higher levels of self-control use their time in transit differently. “Those individuals with higher levels of trait self-control are just naturally more likely to … use their commute to think about their day ahead, what their goals are,” he says, adding that “those with lower levels of trait self-control are more likely to give into the temptation of using the commute in a more fun way.” Partaking in those “fun” things—listening to music, reading, and so on—while commuting is not in and of itself negative. But it does introduce the risk that when people arrive at the office, they haven’t fully transitioned into a work mentality and thus might start the day playing catch-up. Apparently, thinking through their days while in transit mitigates this risk.

Interestingly, though, Jachimowicz, Lee, and their fellow researchers found that prodding commuters to think through their days while in transit made them more satisfied with their jobs. “Being able to set aside a few minutes during commuting for prospection can turn a time period that many employees rate as their least desirable into a slightly less aversive time period—or at least a much more beneficial one,” they write. They add that “this is a behavior that can be learned and adopted by employees regardless of their levels of ... self-control.”

Commuting today is a bit different than it used to be not very long ago. (And with the rise of working remotely, there is an increasing number of people who don’t commute at all.) Between 2004 and 2010, the number of British commuters who took the train reporting that they were wasting their time traveling fell by a little more than a third—a drop that researchers attributed to a sharp rise in the number of commuters using their phone to check email, browse the Internet, or listen to music or podcasts. Today, workers interested in further reducing their angst, then, can at least take solace in the fact that their forebears had it worse.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?

If the American dream has not quite shattered as the Millennial generation has come of age, it has certainly scattered. Living affordably and trying to climb higher than your parents did were once considered complementary ambitions. Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.

The dissolution of the American dream isn’t just a feeling; it is an empirical observation. In 2014, economists at Harvard and Berkeley published a landmark study examining which cities have the highest intergenerational mobility—that is, the best odds that a child born into a low-income household will move up into the middle class or beyond. Among large cities, the top of the list was crowded with rich coastal metropolises, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York City.